Firebird Now Available
In Firebird (Ronsdale Press, 2020), 14-year-old Alex, surviving a farmhouse fire, is distressed at the disappearance of his older brother Marco before Christmas in 1915. When he discovers that Marco has been interned along with many other Ukrainian men in a concentration camp in Banff, he is determined to do what he can to visit him–and maybe help him escape.
My hope is that Firebird will allow our young people of today to walk for a while in the shoes of these Canadian immigrant boys—Alex and Marco—back in the midst of a war that tore families apart not only on the battlefields of Europe but in the quieter corners of Canada. We know from the experience of Japanese Canadians that it would happen again during World War II. Watch the newscasts of today and we can see that xenophobia continues to exist in many parts of the world—and in patches within our own country. Maybe the narratives of the past can help us compose better stories for our own time.
Burning the Night~An Award-winner
My latest novel, Burning the Night (NeWest Press), won the 2022 Roebert Kroetsch/City of Edmonton Book Prize, awarded by Audreys Books.
I did a first draft of this novel–aimed at an adult readership–back in 1992. An Alberta press sat on it for a couple of years, then let it go. After tucking the manuscript away in a file drawer, I didn’t retrieve it until until four years ago when I took another look at it and began rewrites. NeWest Press (which had published my first novel, Grace Lake) decided to take it on.
The story: from small-town Alberta, Curtis comes to Edmonton to obtain a teaching degree. There he forms a close friendship with his elderly, blind Aunt Harriet, considered a family pariah due to her eccentric enthusiasm for a lost world of artists and musicians.
When Curtis begins reading aloud to Harriet the diary her intended husband Phillip kept before his death during World War One, an obsessed Curtis examines parallels to his own life: his desire to become a skillful artist and to find fulfilling love.
Burning the Night spans generations and distance, traversing from Vancouver to Halifax, as it bears down on the history of Canadian painting and Curtis’s awakening as a gay man.
Reviews:
“Burning the Night begins with fire; the blackened sketches and journal pages of an artist fluttering down to become memories. Like these charred artefacts, Huser’s eloquent words become a puzzle on the pages, with pieces of the narrative fitting together to slowly reveal the lives of Aunt Harriet and of Curtis. This is the work of a master storyteller.”
“This is a story of inner and outer sight, of blindness both acquired and enforced on us by society. Huser is a sensitive yet ruthless observer of human nature.”
“Like a vivid shock of red in a sepia photo or the lurid love letter of an historical icon, Burning the Night unshackles the past from our dusty preconceptions, bringing it roaring into the full-colour present with the force of an atom bomb. Painting on a wide canvas of famous Canadian history, Huser perfectly conjures that feeling we get when we see images of our old relatives as young adults and think, ‘Wow, they were just like us.”